Why ‘Experts’ Get So Confused about Legal Rights for NonhumansAnimal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

And when they're talking nonsense, the rest of us can
happily exercise our right to ignore them.

Is their confusion perhaps deliberate?

An article in The Week asks: “Should Apes Have Legal Rights?” As the
Nonhuman Rights Project prepares to file its first lawsuit asking a court to
recognize a nonhuman as having the fundamental right to bodily liberty, this
is just one of many media outlets that are increasingly posing the question
and inviting “experts” on all sides to comment.

On the “yes, they should” side, this latest article notes that all the great
apes can learn and use language and express emotions. The writers quote Jane
Goodall of the Nonhuman Rights Project as saying that "There is no sharp
line dividing us from the chimpanzee or from any of the great apes ...
[They] share up to 98.7 percent of their DNA with humans.”

Arguing against giving legal rights to nonhumans, Steve Jones, a professor
of genetics at the University of London, says that even mice share 90
percent of our DNA. "Should they get 90 percent of human rights?" he asks.
"Where do you stop?"

But wait! With almost magical sleight of hand, Professor Jones has just
cleverly changed the subject. None of us have said anything about giving
chimpanzees “human rights”? And that’s where the whole article goes off the
rails – as these debates so often do, especially when the writers and TV
hosts just swallow what these “experts” are saying without ever calling them
on what they’re saying.

Nobody who’s arguing that certain nonhuman animals should be recognized
as having fundamental rights based on their levels of cognition and autonomy
has ever suggested that they should have “human rights.” Human rights are
for humans. Chimpanzee rights would be for chimpanzees. And Dr. Jones’s
argument is nothing more than a straw man.

When we talk of fundamental rights for nonhumans, we’re talking primarily
about the basic rights to bodily liberty (i.e. not to be locked up for life
in a cage) and bodily integrity (not to be invasively experimented on).
Rights that are obviously to do with humans, like the right to vote or equal
pay for equal work, are obviously completely irrelevant to nonhumans.

It’s hard to imagine that supposedly intelligent people like Professor
Jones are really so confused. What seems more likely is that they’re trying
to confuse the rest of us. And this becomes yet more obvious when The Week
interviews another naysayer, the head of the Institute for Creation
Research:

Humans have rights because we live under a moral code,
said John D. Morris, an evolutionary creationist. Animals have no
understanding of that code. "No ape has any awareness of right or wrong," he
said. "If a loose chimp steals a picnic basket in the park, does he go to
jail?"

Mr. Morris, who, according to the Institute for Creation Research, is
"best known for leading expeditions to Mt. Ararat in search of Noah's Ark,"
may sound like he knows what he’s talking about, but again, what he says is
completely untrue. Just for starters:

It’s not because “we live under a moral code” that we humans have
granted ourselves certain fundamental rights, like the right to life and
liberty. These, as you'll recall the Founding Fathers arguing, are
"unalienable Rights.”

And when Mr. Morris notes that a chimpanzee can’t be sent to
jail for stealing, and therefore doesn’t deserve rights, he conveniently
forgets that a five-year-old child is also not held morally accountable,
and that children have basic rights irrespective of the moral codes and
obligations that apply to adults.

Is Mr. Morris truly unaware of all this? Or is he, like Professor Jones,
just trying to confuse us all with phony straw-man arguments?

Just for the record, the legal system in this country generally
recognizes at least four different categories of rights: claim rights,
liberty rights, immunity rights, and authority rights. If that’s all
gobbledygook to you, don’t worry about it. But people like Professor Jones
and Mr. Morris, who want to exercise their right to pontificate on the
rights of humans and other animals, had better be ready to demonstrate that
they know something about what the law actually says about rights.

And when they're talking nonsense, the rest of us can happily exercise
our right to ignore them.

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